‘Mind-captioning’ AI decodes brain activity to turn thoughts into text – Nature
‘Mind-captioning’ AI decodes brain activity to turn thoughts into text
A non-invasive imaging technique can translate scenes in your head into sentences. It could help to reveal how the brain interprets the world.
By Max Kozlov
Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a non-invasive way to explore brain activity. Credit: National Institute of Mental Health / National Institutes of Health / SPL
Reading a person’s mind using a recording of their brain activity sounds futuristic, but it’s now one step closer to reality. A new technique called ‘mind captioning’ generates descriptive sentences of what a person is seeing or picturing in their mind using a read-out of their brain activity, with impressive accuracy.
The technique, described in a paper published today in Science Advances1, also offers clues for how the brain represents the world before thoughts are put into words. And it might be able to help people with language difficulties, such as those caused by strokes, to better communicate.
The model predicts what a person is looking at “with a lot of detail”, says Alex Huth, a computational neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “This is hard to do. It’s surprising you can get that much detail.”
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